At the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival last weekend Chris Price and I spent an hour hauling up material words from my writing and trying to see where the visualist left off and the poet began. We had all kinds of litter onstage: stencil-stamp valentines, a heart box, a ribbon text, old school lettering exercises. Then there were the beautiful objects: Tara McLeod’s poster size printing of ‘thé dansant,’ Bronwyn Lloyd’s prototype pop-up for ‘hello & goodbye,’ the Holloway Press edition of Journey to Portugal (Tara Mcleod again, with Gretchen Albrecht’s collages). It was a lot of fun and I am grateful to Chris for sending me back into old folders and dusty boxes to find things. We did make the leap to digital space but it’s the ballast of those big letters and shaped poems that seems most interesting now.

1 comment:

I simply loved your session with Chris Price. It was one of those astounding events at a writers festival which leaps up from its easy chairs (literally) and hauls the audience in to something visceral, profound, passionate. Each word of your poems stood out in stalks on the page. I will not forget the shock of the one about your blindness ending with:'I have fallen out of a clear sky'. Thank you and to Chris too. If you're interested, I have written up more on the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival including your event on my blog O Audacious Book www.mary-mccallum.blogspot.com

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